Tag Archives: growth hacking

If the movie Matrix was about web hosting and websites, and not showing down questionable pills down Neo’s throat, I think that Morpheus’ monolog would go something like this:“Take a shaddy and free hosting deal for your website, and you’ll wake up back in your boring old analog life, and continue to struggle to make ends meet. If you go for the professional web hosting option, you’ll become the chosen one and go on to do great things online.”

Like I said numerous times on this blog – without a proper web hosting solution, your website is as good as dead. It simply cannot function.

There’s nothing to keep it up and running.

But, even when you find someone who’s willing to keep your site online, you still need to make sure that you’ve chosen the right company for the job. If not, if you made a bad choice and sent your site into the wrong hands – you’ll soon start to experience all sorts of different troubles that come with terrible web hosting.

You’ll start to experience all those awful scenarios that come with hosting your business with a random provider who doesn’t really care about the quality of his service.

The overall safety and accessibility of your website should be one your top priorities in business. That’s why you should never gamble with your web hosting. The stakes are just too high.

It doesn’t really matter what you do or what you sell online, if you’re not capable of keeping your website constantly online and secure – people will abandon ship.

You’ll have a hard time acquiring new and retaining current visitors.

Regardless of how easy your website might be on the eyes – if it tends to frequently go offline, people will lose patience and move on the next best thing. The same goes for your content and proposals. Nothing can compensate for your bad hosting. There isn’t really anything that will encourage your visitors to keep coming back for more if your site isn’t performing right. They’ll move on and never come back. And the worst thing of all? – These displeased individuals will tell everyone they know that your business sucks.

The horror, right?

You don’t want that, do you?

You don’t want people to bounce right off your site and start talking trash about your brand online?

Of course not.

That would be stupid.

That’s why, before you even start to think about chasing clients and growing your online business – you first need to get your digital house in order. If you want to really make a living from what you do or sell online, you cannot be careless with your web hosting. Simple as that.

But what happens when you find a good company to host your site? What happens then? What happens when you cross “find a good hosting solution for my digital business” of your to-do list? What’s your next move?

Focus on getting people to visit your new, shiny and reliable site, of course.

Roll Out the Right Welcome Matt

Acquiring traffic is probably the no.1 challenge most new online businessmen face while taking their first steps in this ever-expanding digital world.

What’s the point of owning a professional website if no one spends any time on it?

Website traffic is really important to online businesses. No, scratch that – it’s everything to them! If there’s no traffic, then there are no new leads, which means that your sales number will stagnate. And when that happens, when you stop generating new sales – you might as well close up shop and start working on your next best business idea.

So, how can a new site find its audience?

Simple, by doing the following things:

Getting the People You Want to Test Your Website Before You Go After Them Like a Mad Dog

Sure, you can promote your site and buy some new traffic, but that doesn’t really mean that you’ll be reaching out to the right crowd. You may target people who share the same interest as you do, but that also doesn’t necessarily guarantee you anything. Even if you get them to click on your site and take a look around – that still doesn’t mean that they’ll come back for more.

No. Before you even start to think about reaching out to a larger crowd, you first have to develop your core audience. You need to create a group of people that will frequently visit your site, so you can learn from them what they like and what they dislike about the way you present yourself online. Only then will you truly understand what makes you special and what you need to do in order to make your brand and business appealing to a larger number of people.

So, how can you build your core audience?What do you need to do in order to stimulate your current and potential shopper to keep coming back to your site and start spreading good words about your business?

By testing your site, content, and proposals on the right people.

Before you go ahead and start chasing people around the Web to click on your site, you need to know that there is an infinite number of things that could affect your sales, Also, you need to know that almost every little detail can affect how your targeted audience will think of your brand in general. This will of course also have a significant effect on your overall site traffic.

This is a good time as any to tell you that regardless of what you do or sell online, you constantly need to test your efforts and look for insights that will tell you what’s working for you, and what’s not. It’s all about finding the most effective way on how to present your products or services to the right crowd.

There’s no universal or lasting solution here. No. The Web is constantly evolving. What’s hot today, tomorrow could be ancient history. That’s why it’s of crucial importance that you ALWAYS keep your ear to the ground, listen to what’s trending and try your best to jump on that bandwagon that’s currently rollin’.

Before we dig in deeper, we first and foremost need to wrap your mind around this sentence:If you want to do business online, you need to build a website for your audience, not yourself.

Period.

They’re the ones who are really going to use it, not you.

Most digital entrepreneurs make the same mistake here. They create their website in an image that suits their needs and preferences, and not their targeted audiences.

You don’t want to make the same mistake as they do, do you?

That’s why you, as a newbie in this digital business, should focus on testing out these four critical components on the right people, before you go out and chase your future clients:

1. Content (sales copy, headlines, your general tone of communication, etc);
2. Billing and purchasing (the entire process of doing business with you or buying something from your site needs to be as simple as possible);
3. Opt-in offer (making sure if that your collecting all the right data from your leads and customers);
4. Site navigation, UX (figuring out if your user journey is good enough, if everything is in the right place and if your clients are being served with all the necessary data)

Ok, great – but how can I test all of these things when there still isn’t any real traffic on my site? Where can I find the right type of people that could help me gather all the right insights?

The solution to this problem is quite simple: All you need to do is buy some traffic through PPC. With PPC, you get instant, cheap traffic, based on your targeted keywords. If you set your campaign right, if you bid for the right descriptive keywords – you’ll learn a lot about your targeted crowd and what you need to do in order to make your site and offers interesting to them.

2. Personalize Your Site – Make Sure That IT Offers a Unique Experience

Yes. This is extremely important.

Regardless of how great your website may look, you still need to make sure that it offers people enough reasons to keep visiting it over and over again. It’s your job to make sure that your audience sees some value in what you do or sell site. In order for them to come back, their first experience must be more than satisfactory.

That’s why it’s of crucial importance that you do everything in your power to provide them with exemplary and unique experience that will transform these casual visitors into your die-hard brand advocates.

b.) Showcasing your products and services in clever “best of”, “special deal” curated sections that immediately grab your visitors and attention and lure them to investing more about those specific offers. It doesn’t really matter what you curate here, as long as you speak to your customers need in ways that are appealing to them. You can curate events, roundups, product content or large banners on your homepage or sidebar lists – it doesn’t really matter as long as you create different curated sections for different landing pages that will help your audience quickly jump to where they want to be.

c.) Highlighting your new website entries. Keep your popular and new content front and center. Also, be sure to suggest other types of content on your site that your readers’ also may like.

d.) Creating a ton of communication that makes you unique.

e.) Rewarding your fans. Make sure you do everything that you could to acknowledge those who often visit your site and engage with your content or proposals. Your main objective here should be to deepen their loyalty even further by personally reaching out to these individuals and offering them all sorts of different discounts, gifts, and thank you notes for spreading good words about your brand online.

3. Start a Blog

Blogging is great for online businesses. Especially new ones. Apart from generating new links and capitalizing on relevant short and long-tail keywords in SERP, blogging helps brands establish authority in their market. It helps them reach out to the right people in a unique way that instantly demonstrates their worth and knowledge about a particular subject.

Naturally, in order to make it big online via blogging, you really need to understand your targeted audience. You really need to know for whom you’re exactly writing, what your desired crowd likes, what it dislikes, where does it hang out, and what kind of things are troubling them on daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

If you want to generate traffic on your site via blogging, you need to locate your audience’s pain points and do your best to provide real answers to the thing that hold them back. But that’s not all. A lot of brands today have blogs. Some of them have more than one. They’re all familiar with the benefits that come with blogging. It doesn’t really matter if you write about web hosting, content marketing, SEO, cooking, fashion, or even household items – there are basically hundreds and thousands of other sites around the world who are doing the exact same thing as you are.

That’s why, if really want to make it in this department – you need to constantly follow what other brands from your niche are doing, and do your best to produce content that’s at least 10x better than the one that they publish on their sites.

If you want to grow your audience and generate some real traffic on your site, apart from blogging, advertising your business all over popular search engines and social media channels, you really need to focus on developing an outreach strategy that will help you intelligently present your business in all the right places.

Guest post, link building, PR – basically everything that will help you appear on popular sites in a smart and engaging way.

Why? – Well, because, 81% of the people online trust the information they read online. Especially on popular na credible sites.

Let me show this again to you in a different way:

This should be your mantra.

There’s certain power behind online recommendations.

That’s why a lot of online businessmen spend a great deal of time developing killer content and pitching their ideas to such sites as Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, INC, etc.

The ROI behind appearing on such web addresses in the right light is unmeasurable. And not just these site, but all the others that have a great deal of frequent readers that could be interested in your products and services.

This is probably the best way to lure people back to your site. You offer them a glimpse of your knowledge and expertise, and if they’re impressed by it – they’ll come looking for more!

But, in order to truly benefit from your outreach strategy and keep those new leads coming, you need to make sure that your website has something to offer them. You cannot do outreach, if you don’t really have an active blog on your own site. They’ll bounce right back if there’s nothing there to keep them coming back for more.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. If you have anything to add or ask on this subject, feel free to write your thoughts in your comments section below.

It doesn’t really matter who you are, or what you do – you’re in the business of making more sales for you or your employer! Sales was, is, and forever will be the foundation of every living and breathing business. It’s the no.1 goal of every single profitable enterprise out there. And why shouldn’t it be? – If you fail to generate new customers, then it’s only a matter of time when you’ll be forced to close up shop, and move on to your next best idea.

Without new sales, there’s no business. Period. Yes, it’s simple as that. That’s why every serious brand out there is going out of its way to charm their possible buyers into purchasing some of their services or products. They are doing everything in their power to get people to acknowledge their efforts and motivate them to eventually purchase something on their website.

Even though this sounds pretty straightforward, creating sales isn’t really that easy. We live in a day and age where almost every business has the chance to work globally. Everyone who has at least some knowledge of how the Internet works, has the power to reach out to his or her targeted customers. Thanks to that, it doesn’t matter in which niche you operate – if it’s profitable, you’ll gonna have some competition.

Like that wasn’t enough, these days, no one really just randomly walks into the store, takes a lot around, and buys something. Nope. Especially in the B2B world. Today’s shoppers are insanely smart and well-educated. All their decisions are fueled by data and the information that they find online.

Knowing this, most digital marketers, myself included, understand that we cannot make people buy our stuff, just because we asked them to. No. In order to get our targeted crowd to make any sort of a conversion on our site, we need to give them something of true value. We need to become something more than just salesmen. We need to figure out how to charm our customers and influence their decisions, instead of just force annoying advertisements in front of their eyes.

How come? – Well, because, ads don’t really sell products these days – content does. And not just content, but all those other little things that govern human behavior and help us influence our targeted crowd for the better.

Today, I want to write about that. I want to write about all those things that help us charm our customers into creating more conversions on our site:

The Gain Game

It doesn’t really matter what you do, or if you run a big or small business – conversion optimization is never something that comes easy to anyone. Even though your mission is pretty clear here, influencing your site visitors to take action on your site is never really that simple as it might seem.

If you try to push something their way, 9 out 10 people will rebel against your ads, CTAs and proposals. They will leave your site and never come back. How come? – Well, because, they’ll see you as desperate. Your targeted users will immediately picture you as someone who has only one thing on his mind – to rob them out of their money!

You don’t want that. You never want to make your visitors feel like you’re only interested in their cash, even though you really are. That’s why, when coming up with a successful conversion generating strategy, you need to have in mind that your main objective here is to empower your visitors decisions, and not force your will on them.

Loss Aversion

One my favorite conversion generating tactics is the so-called “loss aversion” approach. It’s quite simple and logical, really. Research has shown that people derive more satisfaction from avoiding loss, than gaining something. Most successful marketers know that, and that’s why they’re always trying to approach their customers with messages that guarantee success or a certain value for them.

If people feel like there’s even the slightest chance they could be seen as losers in a certain deal – they won’t bite. That’s why you need to do everything in your power to feed your customers with knowledge that ensures them that they’re making the right decision by doing business with you.

Always list the benefits, and make sure that your users feel like they’re constantly gaining new value from your products and services. Also, make sure that your audience sees exactly how much loss they are avoiding. Groupon has done a great job here. The people behind this brand are extremely good in utilizing loss for their clients. They actually show you just how much money will you save, if you decide to act now. Brilliant!

In my experience, people are actually willing to spend money, in order to avoid a perceived loss. That’s why it’s of crucial importance that you focus on the benefits of your deal, instead of just pushing your products and services on your shoppers.

Free Trials

I cannot stress enough the importance of giving free trials to your customers. Being a natural extension of the above-mentioned approach, free trials work extremely well in the B2B world. Why? – Well, because most people tend to overvalue things, and usually, in that process, get complete off track. They start to develop all sorts of doubts, which usually result in the creation of an additional layer of risk.

But, with free trials, all this goes away. Apart from demonstrating confidence in your products and services to your targeted crowd, you’re also utilizing loss in the best way possible. You’re giving something for free, without the necessity of receiving something back.

This is great!

Why? – Well, because you’re engaging your users. Next to that, you’re giving them a chance to see what’s behind the curtain, before they even leave their digits on your site. That’s why, once I get people to sample my goods, I do everything in my power to feed them with additional content that teaches them how to successfully use my products or services in order to win big in business. This sort of thing has usually worked well for me in the past. Once people see the value behind your offerings and how to utilize them, they’ll get attached and usually end up becoming your long term customers.

The “You Can Do It” Method

One of the reasons people don’t actually purchase something is because they don’t really understand it. Most of them don’t really go forward and pay for something that interests them because they don’t think that they’ll know how to use it right. It looks hard. This is especially common with tool/software world. Sure, price also plays a major factor here, but not big enough to actually turn real customers away.

Knowing this, it’s your job to reassure your targeted audience that they’ll get their money’s worth if they go ahead and purchase your products. They need to know that there’s no chance in Hell that they’ll end up wasting hours and hours on learning how your software works, only to see themselves fail at making it worth their while.

That’s why most big brands, like SEMRush, for example, write all sorts of content that demonstrates to their users how to get the most out of their subscription. This is how you optimize your conversions – you educate your users and feed them with all sorts of easy tips and tricks on how to win big in business.

Reassure, Reward

You need to constantly reassure your crowd that they’re making the right choice by doing business with you, and that their success is something that’s unavoidable, as long as they stick with you.

That’s why it’s important to reward success, and write all sorts of use cases, case studies that demonstrate how certain individuals have made the most out of their investment with you.

People learn by example. It’s good for them to see that someone similar to them is winning on all fronts. This sort of thing makes success relatable. That’s why content marketing should always be on top of your marketing priority list. It really does work, if you know how to use it right. It will help you triple your conversion percentage, if you just invest a little brain power into it and start to think as your users and potential targeted customers do.

Apart from that, it’s also highly advisable to constantly motivate your users, provide feedback, and reward them when they complete a certain action correctly or reach a specific milestone.

It’s important to keep your long-term users satisfied. It’s not that hard to satisfy those clients that already love your brand, but it’s a huge waste if you don’t make an actual effort to them feel special. How come? – Well, because, these people are usually the ones that already trust your brand and services, and they are probably willing to upgrade their package if you give them enough reasons to do so. That why you need to plan ahead, and focus on the future. You need to take extra good care of them and feed them with great new deals and discounts, because these are the people that are most likely to convert again on what it is that you’re selling.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you have anything to add or ask – feel free to write your thoughts in the comments section below!That’s it for now,See you soon again,Goran @ AltusHost B.V.